Cabbages and Kings
by Grav
Summary: Part the Fifth: In which Janet is coolly efficient, Daniel is unable to offer an adequate explanation, Teal'c plays devil's advocate and then redeems himself admirably and Jack reopens old wounds.
1. Part the First

AN: This story came from a very odd place. I was telling someone to stop moving and I was being ignored, so I finally barked "Don't move a muscle!". Then Daniel answered me (in my head) and I realized I just had to fic it.  
  
Originally, this was a stand alone story, until I realized that it fit in nicely as a pre-ep for "Foothold". I'm a little obsessed with context.  
  
Disclaimer: According to the dictionary, "own" is a verb meaning "to have possession of". Sigh. . .  
  
Summary: In which Teal'c is mostly silent, Sam is mostly interrupted, and Jack and Daniel argue crustaceans.  
  
..................  
  
Cabbages and Kings  
  
There was a tremendous amount of water on this planet. The MALP had made sure that it was actually water. Before SG-1 had ever geared up for their mission, the probe had run a series of chemical tests to ensure that the water consisted of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, and would thus not be responsible for any unexpected possessions or odd hostage scenarios. Never let it be said that the USAF did not learn from its mistakes.  
  
According to Teal'c, the planet had been abandoned by the Goa'uld after a climatic experiment went awry. He wasn't quite sure what the System Lords had been planning the result of their tampering to be, but he knew that it had failed spectacularly. The ice caps had melted and the oceans had overrun the shoreline. Since there was more water, and the temperature had increased, the evapouration rate had also increased. This, in turn, meant that the amount of precipitation had also gone up. It rained a lot on P9X 171.  
  
According to Sam, there was still a great deal of naquadah on this planet, but most of the mines had been in the coastal regions and they were flooded out. Still, there were some higher regions she was eager to check out, so she followed Teal'c along the rocky beach. Besides, one never knew what technological goodies the Goa'uld might have left behind.  
  
According to Daniel, most of the life on P9X 171 was in the oceans. This came as a surprise to absolutely no one. Since the risen sea level had covered most of the habitation sites, SG-1's archaeologist had resigned himself to a mission wherein he would not find too many artefacts. Still, the Goa'uld had been there, and Daniel had a tendency of being lucky.  
  
According to Jack, this planet was very wet.  
  
The sky of P9X 171 was uniformly gray in colour. Since it had been raining more or less continually since SG-1's arrival, this was not unusual. Daniel thought it was depressing, and told Jack as much, but Jack liked the variation. Most skies were blue. He'd asked why, completely rhetorically of course, only to spend the next ten minutes trying to shut Sam, who was a good ten paces in front of him and completely oblivious of his wind stolen voice, up.  
  
The ocean was also gray. This made sense to Jack, as water is pretty much a reflexion of the sky. Teal'c, who had a great eye for detail, pointed out that the sea was almost the exact colour as the watery illusion produced by the Stargate's active wormhole. It was a bit more choppy.  
  
The rock was gray as well. Some form of granite, Daniel had informed them, with just enough slate to make it more than a little oppressive. Centuries of constant water erosion had produced some truly amazing formations. Daniel placated himself by taking photographs of them in the absence of a material record. For the first few minutes, Jack had taken every opportunity he could to call the rocks "rocks", because they were. Daniel had quickened his pace. There was a lichen growing on the rocks (though Sam said it was actually closer to algae), and off in the distance, Jack thought he saw trees, but that was pretty much it for plant life.  
  
The sand, what little of it there was on this planet, was brown. This helped immensely.  
  
As they made their way down the windswept beach, soaked to the bone in spite of the tax dollars spent on designing their raingear, Sam's naquada detector picked up only the faintest traces of the mineral. She reluctantly informed her CO that P9X 171 would not be a viable naquadah source. Jack's face, which had taken on a resigned appearance when Teal'c informed him there was no trace of Goa'uld technology left, turned downright bleak. Sighing in frustration, he looked up at the weeping sky, and then shook his head in an attempt to get the water out of his ears. Teal'c wondered why O'Neill, whom he knew to be an avid fisherman, would refuse to wear the practical headgear Sam called a fisherman's hat and Daniel declared a sou'ester like the rest of his water free eared team.  
  
P9X 171 had three moons. Jack did not know what this meant, and after the blue sky fiasco, he was reluctant to put the matter to his 2IC. He was vaguely aware that on Earth the moon controlled the tides, and some small part of his brain rationalized that three times the moon could mean three times the tide, but he figured Carter would warn them if they were in danger. Assuming, of course, she could pry her attention away from the detector long enough to notice anything.  
  
Daniel had wandered slightly away from the others, passing both Sam and Teal'c as he strove to get a better angle on the various outcroppings he was interested in. He had gone a fair bit ahead, when he stopped walking, and switched his camera for his binoculars. With absolutely no warning at all, Daniel took off down the windswept beach, and carefully edged himself out on to a rocky ledge that stuck out about fifteen feet into the water. Heedless of the treacherously slippery rock, Daniel went to his knees and began pawing at something on the ground.  
  
Jack spotted the dilemma almost immediately. The tide was definitely coming in, and it was encroaching inch by inch on the ledge Daniel was perched on. Worse, the tide would cut off the access point in fairly short order. Jack always had trouble extricating Daniel from archaeological situations, and something told him this time would be no different. The first order of business, therefore, was to figure out what Daniel was doing on the ledge in the first place.  
  
"Daniel?" Jack called out deceptively lightly as soon as they were within voice range. "Whatcha doing?"  
  
"There are inscriptions here, Jack!" Daniel called out excitedly. Jack cursed inwardly. "This planet was abandoned by the Goa'uld and they never come here! This might be Kheb!"  
  
"I don't think it would be wise to bring a baby here, do you?" Jack couldn't resist saying it, but as soon as he had he knew he'd made a mistake. Now Daniel was ignoring him. He gestured for Sam to take over.  
  
"Can't you just take pictures Daniel? That tide is coming in pretty fast." She called out.  
  
"No," came the muffled yell back as Daniel sucked his thumb after injuring it on something Jack couldn't see.  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"There's some kind of. . .shellfish."  
  
Sam looked at her CO, her eyebrows almost to her hairline, and shrugged. The water had now reduced the ledge to about ten feet in length and had completely engulfed the access way. Daniel hadn't noticed because he had pulled out his pocket knife and was carefully prying the crustaceans off of the carved rocks. It was time for the Voice of Reason.  
  
"Daniel Jackson!" Teal'c did not yell, but his voice had great resonance somehow, "You have placed yourself in a precarious position. You must come back now before the water becomes too deep."  
  
"Just a few more moments." Daniel punctuated every syllable by removing a shellfish. He was uncovering the inscription from left to right, and every rightward shift took him farther from his teammates and closer to the algae covered incline on the seaward side of the ledge.  
  
Finally, Jack could take it no longer. Wet as he was, he had no desire at all to compound his drenched state with a dip in an alien ocean. Jokes hadn't worked, common sense had not been enough, and even reason had not prevailed. It was time for orders.  
  
"Daniel! Stop!" barked Jack in a tone that brought Carter reflexively to attention and had absolutely no effect at all on the errant archaeologist. "Don't move a muscle!"  
  
"Actually Jack, I'm pretty sure these are oysters."  
  
Daniel prised the last of the taxonomically contested members of the crustacean family off of the rock face. He finally sheathed his knife, drew his camera, and began taking pictures, but he was too late. The next wave broke over the promontory and was just strong enough to pull him towards the algae, which was just slippery enough to foment his already legendary inability to balance, and he went careening into the sea.  
  
Jack said a number of things that cannot be repeated in polite company as he handed his gun and gear off to Sam, tossed one end of a long rope to Teal'c, secured the other to his waist, and waded out to the ledge. Taking care to scuff his heals every so lightly on the offending tablets, he set himself on the unalgaeed rock, and tossed a second rope to the merrily water treading Daniel. Daniel pulled himself in and then used Jack as a counter-weight to steady his crawl up the rock face. His grin did not fade in the face of Jack's wrath.  
  
"This isn't Kheb," he announced cheerfully as he and Jack waded back to 'dry' land. "The Goa'uld were trying to create a tropical environment. They, uh, missed."  
  
Jack said nothing, merely took his gear back from Sam and started walking back towards the Stargate.  
  
"You might be interested in the pictures, Sam." Daniel continued. "I think it's some sort of manual. There's a lot of technical jargon. I mean, it didn't work, but you might be able to get something out of it."  
  
While Daniel and Sam chattered happily back and forth about the potential to create tropical paradise and the psychological ramifications thereof, Jack stalked over to the DHD and began to dial home. Pausing only long enough to stick his finger in his ear in a vain attempt to relocate some of the water contained therein, Jack entered the SG-1 IDC.  
  
Teal'c waited a few seconds, then strode up the ramp and stepped through. Daniel followed him and, in a move that Jack was pretty sure defied at least one of the laws of physics, turned to face Jack and tossed him something just as he crossed the event horizon. Off Carter's questioning glance, Jack looked down at the small, round object in his hand.  
  
It was a pearl.  
  
"For cryin' out loud!"  
  
..................  
  
AN: I've been waiting to end a story that way! I finally broke down and added "cryin'" to my spell checker.  
  
The more astute of you will have noticed that this story contains neither cabbages nor kings. It's kind of a nonsense story full of inside jokes (which, if you know where they are, are pretty funny), and the line "Cabbages and Kings" is from Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter", which, of course, I do not own.  
  
The "Why is the sky blue" gag is one of my favourites. I've discovered that if you ask a question enough times, eventually you get an answer. I am not sure how climatically correct this was, but I would think that having three moons (provided they were all on the same side of the planet) would effect the tidal bulge. Think Bay of Fundy-ish. 


	2. Part the Second

AN: Really, this has nothing to do with Part the First, except it's still Stargate, it's still rather nonsensical, and it's still raining.  
  
My parting shot before I go to Egypt, this goes out to soclose, who said "Put it in a fic!"  
  
..................  
  
The cave which they had taken shelter in when the rain finally became too thick to see through was just a bit too small. They and all of their gear fit into it, of course, but they were all rather cramped. The fact that they had now been confined to the cave for approximately six hours was not helping.  
  
The rain on this planet did not seem to have the same effect on things as the rain did on Earth. Specifically, things did not get wet. The grass and trees were as dry as the Sahara, and even the lake they had passed earlier had an odd, not watery aspect to it. They and all of their gear, naturally, did not share this immunity and were, accordingly, sopping.  
  
Sam had immediately theorized that the flora of this planet had some sort of shield which, for reasons she was completely uncertain, protected them from the rain. Jack had decided that this was pretty cool, until he discovered that the shield also prevented him from turning the nice dry kindling Teal'c had collected into a campfire. Then, he had gotten rather bitter.  
  
The wind outside the cave was, quite literally, howling. Teal'c winced occasionally as the combination of rock and wind produced some truly abhorrent attempts at counterpoint. The wind lashed at the rain, driving it sideways, which bothered absolutely no one, except for SG-1, who happened to be the only sentient life in that particular solar system.  
  
Jack decided that it wasn't really the wood that was preventing his fire being lit; that it must be the wind. He moved his windscreen a little to his right and flicked his lighter again. The howling gale extinguished the hapless flame within nanoseconds of it sparking.  
  
"O'Neill," said Teal'c, as he gazed out the dripping, but not wet cave. "I believe that the wind screen would be most effective in its original position. The wind is southerly."  
  
"If I see any hawks, I'll let them know." Jack said in a surly tone, moving the screen again.  
  
Daniel, who had obviously stopped to explore when on his wood gathering mission despite the deluge, burst into the cave at that moment. He was drenched, but the sticks in his arms were a marshmallow's worst nightmare.  
  
"I think, Jack," he said as he deposited his arm load of wood on to the pile Teal'c had started, "That if you are going to insist on bringing us to rainy, treeish planets, you have better expand the supply list to include handsaws or something."  
  
When Samantha Carter joined the USAF, she knew that she would gain many practical experiences. She never for a moment thought that snorting water out of her nose and all over a naquadah detector while the rest of her team sat inadvertently misquoting Hamlet around a camp fire they could not light would be one of them.  
  
..................  
  
AN: Oh, I wish I could sleep! This is what happens when I can't. 


	3. Part the Third

**Part the Third**: In which Carter and Teal'c are complete absent, Daniel is unfortunately "dead", Jack learns a thing or two about Kelowanan courtship, and a chance remarks comes back to bite Jonas in the ass.

AN: I still hate Jonas. I want that made perfectly clear.

When I wrote "Let Them Eat Cake", someone suggested that I write a series of Jonas meets Culture stories. I planned on never doing it. And here we are.

Spoilers: Minor for Forsaken.

Jack had made it one of his goals to get Jonas Quinn off of the Weather Channel. This was because most of Jack's jokes were dependent upon his listener's knowledge of popular culture, and he was getting tired of the blank stare followed by an explanation for Carter. To that end, he had arranged for a series of "technical difficulties" which prevented the Kelowanan from getting cable in his quarters, and if Jonas noticed that Jack was always on hand with a selection of videos whenever such outages occurred, he said nothing.

So it was that Jonas began his education on the finer points of living on the planet he now called home. As the weeks progressed, he abandoned the Weather Channel altogether, instead devoting his time to the likes of Spielberg, Stone and Cameron. After about two months, Carter had decided that his education was too one sided and, over Jack's vehement protestations, began adding British comedy, musicals, and movies made before the 1950s.

Eventually, it got to the point where the people who worked in Blockbuster got to know Jack by name and became comfortable enough around him to joke at his apparent lack of social life. Jack, never one to take things like that lying down, had told the overenthusiastic salespeople, not completely untruthfully, that the movies were for a friend who couldn't get out much. Since Jack possessed some unique ability which allowed to him to sound like he was fabricating, even when he was telling the truth, all he got in return was the patronizing glance he used to give Daniel when he was talking about the importance of some stone or other.

The next day, instead of writing his official report about SG-1's trip to PX4-812, Jack had spent most of his time badgering Hammond about getting Jonas leave to go off base for non-mission related business. Hammond, more or less to shut him up, had promised to pull every string he could.

Taking Jonas to the video store was one of the more trying experiences of Jack's life. Jonas wandered up and down the aisles for more than an hour, so overwhelmed by the choices available that he was unable to make one. Almost all of the people in the store had been subjected to a lengthy interrogation on their favourite movie genre and what was the best film available to be rented. At one point, a young man caught Jack's eye, and the Colonel could see that the man now understood why Jack usually came alone.

Finally, Jonas approached the register with his selection in hand. Jack refrained from making his annoyingly habitual sarcastic comment about having enough time to make life altering decisions, because Jonas had an equally annoying habit of missing sarcasm, and Jack wasn't emotionally prepared to spend any more time in the movie store. He paid for the movie without even checking the title. Jonas was being paid an Air Force salary now, and had arranged for a portion of each cheque to be deposited into Jack's account when he realized how much renting movies cost.

Jack traditionally ran his stop watch to determine how much time passed between the start of the movie and Jonas' first question. The time varied by movie, as did the number of questions. "Terminator" for example had been relatively uninterrupted, whereas it took almost a week to get through "Dude, Where's My Car?"

Apparently, a grandfather reading a story to his sick grandson, who in turn would rather be playing video games made perfect sense to Jonas, because he said nothing. The blissful silence lasted until the hero was about to set off on his quest, leaving his true love at home on her farm.

"If she has a farm, why does he need a fortune?"

Jack paused the movie. It was one of the rules, or neither of them would ever have made it through "Mission Impossible".

"Marriage between two people of different class was frowned on," Jack began. He wondered absently who had died and made him Daniel before he remembered what happened next in the movie, and back pedaled a little. "Well, more for women. Women weren't supposed to marry beneath themselves. It was a sign of weakness and sentimentality."

"But her status wouldn't change!"

"Well yes, it's a stupid tradition. That's probably why we don't really do it anymore."

"Oh," Jonas paused and Jack was about to start the VCR when he began again, "That reminds me. One of the girls in the video store told me that the movie she is excited about isn't on video yet. Apparently, you can go somewhere here in town, pay even more money, and see movies on a big screen."

"Jonas, what do those two things have to do with each other?"

"Well," he turned a little pink. "She said her boy-friend was taking her to see it tonight. I just wondered if movies had replaced fortune seeking."

Jack muted the television. It was going to be one of _those _evenings.

"Don't you people date?"

"Date what?"

"Each other! You know, boy meets girl, boy gets nervous, boy finally asks girl out, boy and girl go to movie? There's a whole whack of customs and unwritten rules. It's very stressful."

"Rules?"

"When you can hold hands, when you're allowed to kiss her, how long you should wait before you....get married."

"That might be the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard."

Jack sighed. "So if you don't date, how do you ....meet people?"

"When we're old enough, we ask our parents to look around for us, and then we get married." Jonas explained. "Our way sounds a great deal simpler, if you ask me. Every once in a while someone rebels, but for the most part we all get happy endings in the end."

"Now that is ridiculous." Jack said, reaching for the congealing popcorn. "Wait. Are you telling me that when that convict kissed you...."

"Yes."

"So how did you know to never trust a girl who kisses on the first date?"

"Star Trek, Jack. The first alien is always lying. Especially if they try and kiss you."

Jack couldn't quite stop the grin that spread across his face as he reached for the remote.

**finis**

AN: I made up a lot of stuff about Jonas here. Sorry.

Also, the movie is "Princess Bride", which seems to make it into an unreasonable number of my fics, and the rule about pausing for questions was created for my mother, so she wouldn't miss things when she said things like "Which one is Tom Cruise again?" and "Oh, so there isn't a safe in that boat! It's a decoy!"


	4. Part the Fourth

AN: There are four ways you can detect naquadah:

1. You are a symbiote, and it is in your blood.  
2. You are a Jaffa or a host and can feel your symbiote's reaction.  
3. You are a host whose Goa'uld has died within, leaving the necessary protein markers.  
4. You are holding an electronic naquadah detector.

Spoilers: Minor for In the Line of Duty, The Curse and Fail Safe.

To Red, because I never _ever_ would have come up with this on my own.

------

**Cabbages and Kings – Part the Fourth **

_In which we discover why Sam is so reluctant to leave the mountain, and she comes to terms with it._

The longest she had ever made it was six days. Six of, quite possibly, the longest diurnal cycles she had ever endured. When she got back to the base, it was all she could do not to run into the 'Gate room and kiss it.

It was in that precise moment that Sam Carter realized she had a problem.

When she was on missions, it wasn't so bad. It didn't have to be _her_ 'Gate, it just had to be _a _'Gate. It was not until the mission to Egypt that she realized that it was not the 'Gate itself, it was what the 'Gate represented. If she was close to a mine, or a group of Jaffa, or, heaven help her, captured by a Goa'uld, then she was okay. But when she was on-world, off-base, she got really _really_ antsy.

It was not, as Jack suspected, that she was a work-a-holic. Well, not completely anyway. She loved her work, she always had. But it was not because of this that she hated leaving the mountain. Jack wanted to take her fishing. In Minnesota. Hundreds of kilometres away. That, Jack would argue, was the point. In Jack's mind, "fun" was irrevocably linked to "away", and the further away you went, the more fun you had.

Sam, naturally, had found the hole in that logic immediately. If fun equalled away, she had queried, then shouldn't their missions count? They certainly were further than Minnesota. In Jack's world however, missions never left the mountain by more than a few dozen steps (if they were lucky). It had caused her no end of pain to admit that his rationale was not completely unfounded.

Daniel was convinced that it was emotional, that her upbringing had made her desire to do good on a cosmic scale and that it caused her pain to stop. He was a dear, but he had a tendency to project sometimes. He had suffered no end of trials on the trip to Egypt when, caught between Janet's detailed analysis of the pilot's flight errors and Sam's mile by mile report of how far away from Colorado they were, he had resisted the urge to run, screaming, from the plane.

Sam had tried to delicately point out that, while she had some crippling emotional traumas, they weren't really as connected to the 'Gate as were his own. Daniel had laughed, and poured out their twenty-seventh cup of coffee since beginning their analysis of the Ancient artefact SG-14 had brought home three days earlier.

She was almost convinced that Teal'c understood. She knew he didn't, couldn't really, share her feelings, but he knew what she went through when they were off-base. Teal'c had not come to Egypt, which Sam did not hold against him, but if he had, maybe Sam would not have been so surly.

Sam recognized that it wasn't healthy, that getting a fix, even inadvertently, from a friend was the SGC equivalent of trafficking, even if no one knew what she was doing. But she couldn't help it any more than she could help her incessant need to dismantle technological gadgets. She talked about it sometimes with Cassie, but Cass never seemed to suffer as much as she herself did. Maybe, Sam theorized, it was because she was exposed a great deal more often that Cassie was.

There were no support groups. There was no one she could call. There were few, if any, like her in the Universe, caught against their will between two worlds and endlessly craving something that, due to a cosmic misalignment of element distribution, did not exists anywhere in her solar system. Except the SGC.

So she arranged her living room furniture into the closest approximation of a circle she could get without a string and a measuring tape. Feeling very much like she had when she had gone to her friend's tea-parties when she was little, she stood up and coughed.

"My name is Samantha Carter….and I am addicted to naquadah."

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AN: Hey, it would sure explain a lot!


	5. Part the Fifth

Cabbages and Kings Part the Fifth 

AN: Man, I don't even remember how we got this one. I know I said something, and then there was a list and a lot of giggling, and some how, here we are.

Spoilers: Emancipation and Hathor, but the actual fic takes place at some point in season four. Give or take

_In which Janet is coolly efficient, Daniel is unable to offer an adequate explanation, Teal'c plays devil's advocate and then redeems himself admirably, and Jack reopens old wounds._

"Really, Major, I think it turned out all right," Jack said placatingly, swinging his feet back and forth off of the side of one of the examination beds as he spoke.

"Just once, I would like to materialize on a planet where it's the men who are the second class citizens." Sam flinched.

"Hold still, Sam." Janet was trying valiantly not to sound too patronizing. "I'll be done more quickly if you stop squirming."

Sam stilled, although her fingers kept drumming on the bed, signaling that she was still very frustrated.

"You know, Sam," Daniel began, speaking in his lecturing voice. "There's actually no such thing as a true matriarchal society in Earth's history. It stands to reason that we wouldn't encounter one on our travels."

Sam glared at him and flinched away from Janet.

"Sam! I'll have Teal'c hold you in place if – "

"Sorry Janet," Sam said through clenched teeth. "I'll be still."

Janet rolled her eyes and continued stitching. Sam, true to her word, stopped fidgeting for the most part, though her fingers drummed on, muffled by the sheet.

"I do not understand, Major Carter," Teal'c said. "You defended yourself with great efficiency and Daniel Jackson was able to diffuse the situation and resolve it in a way that is beneficial to both sides. Where in this is the problem?"

There were several seconds, during which Sam closed her eyes and counted to ten, Janet cut the thread, and Jack had a very suspicious fit of coughing.

"The problem," Sam said. "Is that I was attacked with a knife because I stood on Daniel's left instead of behind him and to the right."

"Had you stood in that location, you would have been on my left." Teal'c pointed out.

Janet daubed at Sam's new stitches with rubbing alcohol. She had other things to do, of course, but this was far more entertaining.

"I think what Sam means is that she was insulted that her gender dictated where she had to stand during the negotiations," Daniel tried.

"Are not seating plans customary when one is in talks with potential allies?"

Daniel opened and shut his mouth several times as he tried and failed to come up with an adequate answer.

"Major," Jack broke in before Sam could launch into another tirade. "It's another culture. They can't help it. At least this time, I didn't have to buy you back and no one went on trial for their life."

"I know, sir. I just…"

"Hey, it's not like your being a woman has never come in handy."

"I know, sir. I just…"

"I mean, I'd have a snake in my gut right now, no offence Teal'c, if you hadn't – "

"Sir! I know!" Sam could feel the headache brought on by the combination of 'Gate travel, blood loss and pure frustration take up residence behind and slightly to the right of her eyes. She looked pleadingly at Janet, hoping her friend would get the message.

"Colonel, she really needs to rest," Janet said. Sam quietly exulted. "Why don't you three go…somewhere else."

"As you wish, Doctor Fraiser," Teal'c said, inclining his head. "Major Carter, you are one of the greatest warriors with whom it has ever been my honour to serve. I hope you make a speedy recovery."

Sam was touched, and remained so until Jack looked back over his shoulder on his way out of the infirmary.

"Hey Carter! You still owe me a hand gun."

------

**fin**


End file.
